I think I've said this all before, and I should probably just add it to the 'Welcome' sticky thread at the top, but I have a feeling that's been lost in random conversations and flying vegetables and whatnot. So. Here's a new one. Don't need to sticky it. Just felt like saying.

SEMI-IMPORTANT NOTICE #1!

Everafter is still an experimental comic project to me. You're going to notice the art taking leaps and bounds in certain directions as it goes on. (For better or worse.)

From the prologue to the new pages, what, about a year passed? You'll notice Red looking all squat in the prologue, and suddenly long and lanky in the new pages. No, she doesn't suffer from degenerative aging, it's just her character design underwent a big arse change since then.
And actually, from these new pages.. you'll notice, after the next.. fifteen or twenty or so, there is another huge gap of time in which I took off to evaluate the style and where I wanted to take it. So it looks different. I genuinely like the art in the new pages, but.. not nearly as much as I do some of the later stuff.

It won't be anything radical to the point of complete style overhauling. Won't look like Disney one moment and JTHM the next. (Though that would be.. interesting, to say the least.) But I will be trying out new methods of making it look more what I want it to be.
Regardless, t will improve. Here's hoping.

SOMEWHAT IMPORTANT NOTICE #2!

Everafter is slow paced. Terribly sorry but that's just how it is!

Whereas 'Snafu', 'Sticky Floors' and such are written in gag-a-day format.. and 'Grim Tales' reads like a big 'ol sprawling gallery of images per page.. Everafter is being scripted and drawn out in more of a traditional manga volume format. Not a webcomic format. This is going to cause some troubling little updates now and then when ten gazillion things aren't happening at once.

Um. I knew I had more half-important stuff to tell, but.. I can't remember. Been a long, busy day at work and I'm beat.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in so I can ignore them. (Kidding, kidding.. )

I'll add more notices later if I see fit.. G'night!

Last edited by Endling on Fri Nov 10, 2006 10:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

Anyway, I do realize that your style changed, and that Red looks different and everything. I just think it great the little coincidence of her looking younger/older you've got going on there.

I also like the fact that Everafter is slow paced. It's not where you're going, it's how you get there. And if that made any sense to you, with the randomly paraphrased Firefly quote in there, I'll be amazed.

"I'm all out. What do ya got?" "A utility belt full of crap and a positive outlook?"

Anyway, I do realize that your style changed, and that Red looks different and everything. I just think it great the little coincidence of her looking younger/older you've got going on there.

I also like the fact that Everafter is slow paced. It's not where you're going, it's how you get there. And if that made any sense to you, with the randomly paraphrased Firefly quote in there, I'll be amazed.

I do love me some Firefly. One of my favorites: Mal: "But she was naked! And all… articulate!" Wash: "Okay! Everybody not talking about sex, in here. Everybody else, elsewhere." Rrgh, got to dig up those DVDs..

wickedali wrote:Even though Red is all small in the prologue and taller in the following pages, does this mean she is still the same age?

Whatever it may be?

Pretend, if you would, that Red were not small at all in the prologue. If I could do it now, I'd redo the entire beginning to make her look exactly as she looks in the new pages. (Well not exactly. More frayed and in her other suit, and perhaps still a tad younger looking..) But yes, she is roughly the same age. I say roughly because the amount of time spent in the asylum is supposed to remain somewhat of an unknown for a little bit.

Haha. I sure as hell don't know Red's age. I never make exact ages for my characters. Only blurry designations like pre/early-teen-ish and whatnot. In which case, Red is floating somewhere in that area.

Slow pace is not a bad thing, nor should it be a stranger to most anyone who reads comics here. Hell, there was a whole month in Grim Tales where every page was just part of a re-rendition of the opening song from Nightmare Before Christmas.

And I would also like to say that people being nitpicky about artistic issues in the comic are just like the people who complain during a cartoon whenever a character appears slightly off model. It's not a big deal, and by just dwelling on it you'll spoil your enjoyment of the show.

*This has been Geno's Two Cents that nobody will give a shit about. He will now be holeing himself up the celler to finish the next chapter of Hamelin's Ashes, while trying to avoid the tempation of Disgaea 2. Goodnight all.*

*We will now return to your regularly scheduled forum banter, already in progrees*

Added after 14 seconds:

*And on an unrelated note, I would just like to remind everyone that Serenity seems to be coming on almost everyday on HBO this past month, so check that out if you like Firefly*

Last edited by Geno on Sat Sep 16, 2006 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Haha, favourite quote ever: River: "This food is problematic". I am SO waiting for a chance to use that...and when it comes, I SO will!

Anyway, back on topic, I do the same thing with my characters about the age thing(though, granted, my characters have to endure being trapped in craptacular art and horrific writing, unlike yours). If you ask me for a number, I'll try to avoid the question as much as possible XD

"I'm all out. What do ya got?" "A utility belt full of crap and a positive outlook?"

Heh. Another question if you can answer it Endling.
What exactly do you do in the way of the arts?
I am not familiar at all with....anime...stuff.

Please Explain this:

.. Everafter is being scripted and drawn out in more of a traditional manga volume format. Not a webcomic format. This is going to cause some troubling little updates now and then when ten gazillion things aren't happening at once

Huh. You may have to rephrase that for me to really catch on to what you're asking.. my brain is muddled from work at the moment. What do I do..? Art-job-wise? What materials do I use and how? How do I take a drawing from start to finish..? Etc? If you can elaborate I'd be happy to answer.

As for what I meant by "Everafter is being scripted and drawn out in more of a traditional manga volume format. Not a webcomic format. This is going to cause some troubling little updates now and then when ten gazillion things aren't happening at once."

..long story short, people may not like updates when it's just a page full of instance drawings, like close ups of what Red just picked up, or looking around a corner, etc. I read a lot of Blade of the Immortal and he's exceptionally good at pacing sequences like a live action movie, and a tremendous inspiration to me. Granted, this means there's not nearly as much action/dialogue that happens from page to page, and since there's a weeks wait in between pages, this may cause the strip to lag. But we'll see.

Eh, my head is malfunctioning.
Heheh. I pretty much know something of how you start off drawing something by hand to only scan it in to your computer so you can touch up the linearts and then digitally colour it. Right?

I can't really elaborate that much.

But I am REALLY interested in how you do your stuff.

Your Art was pretty much the first thing that attracted me to Japanese style artwork.

wickedali wrote:Eh, my head is malfunctioning. Heheh. I pretty much know something of how you start off drawing something by hand to only scan it in to your computer so you can touch up the linearts and then digitally colour it. Right?

Yeah that's pretty much it. What happens from there on in is a different take every time. I'm still learning an awful lot about the process myself. Finding out what particular techniques will work for a particular image is the toughest part. I employ a lot of rougher lines and somesuch.. but I find myself pining for those super clean, shiny looking color images some of my heroes from DA create. Then once I try learning how to do that, I see some truly tremendous folks who can create gorgeous work using a lot of grit, dirty, unpolished lines and such..

Ah, it's a never ending puzzle, it is.

Lately, at least with EA, it's all about distinguishing everything from EVERYTHING else all in grayscale. It runs the serious risk of muddling together the way I've been doing it lately. So I'm taking steps to make more defined lights and shadows, backgrounds and foregrounds, etc..

Don't really have an art job. The illustration business seems to me to be an extremely tough nut to crack. I need to improve so much! So I plug away with my local job, paying bills, sending out portfolios, making new portfolios.. going out to Philly with friends. That's the majority of life right now. Wheehaw.

I DO however, do several freelancing kind of things on the side. Here and there I get requests for jobs via Deviantart. Still working on some of those now, none of which I can mention though without violating many Non-Disclosure Agreements, haha. But promotional stuff for conventions, some character designs here and there, and of course personal commissions.

I don't know if someone asked you this question before and if they did then aww well I'm asking it now...What inspired you to creat a dark version of fairytale stories? How did you think of this awsome concept?

By reading this you promise your soul and first child to me. All babies not ripe and plump are subjected to burnation under the trogdor act of 2003.The problem is that God gave man a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.

"PPGD Fan"-And Dusk_imp, you too are a riot "Blood Knight"-Dusk_Imp, thanks for making this thread, it's so fun. B A Select Start

Dusk_Imp wrote:What inspired you to creat a dark version of fairytale stories? How did you think of this awsome concept?

Well it certainly isn't a concept that hasn't been done before.

The trick was to not make it TOO too close to any of the others.
There's of course, Shrek, but that was more inclined towards humor/satire. There's 'Fables', a super popular comic about all kinds of fairytale characters living in a modern day sort of world.. but it's more in-depth and serious. There's of course, the one I was afraid of being compared to the most, American McGee's Alice, by far the darkest of the franchises I've mentioned. This is largely why I haven't used any Alice in Wonderland characters in Everafter, and don't plan to. Of course there are many more, but I won't go too far into it..

I got the idea for Everafter during a school project. We were supposed to create themed stamps. At first I decided I would make a trio of Fairytale Villain themed stamps. The original mugshots were of Big Bad Wolf, The Witch, and Rumplestiltskin I think. During the project I started doodling random, big eyed children in the margins; generics that were meant to look like fairytale children, the kind you hear about getting chased, lost, gobbled up by trolls all the time..
I later noticed I liked drawing these scary looking kids a lot more than the big bad villains. So I changed the project to the fairytale heroes. But of course, they needed a twist to be interesting. So I threw them into an asylum. Of course these versions (at the time just Little Red, Hansel and Gretel, and Goldilocks.) were the prototypes for the ones featured in the comic now.

Since then, the whole scale of the story has escalated about a thousandfold, haha. I've always loved asylum sequences featured in movies/games, the setting is so unique, unsettling and eerie. Naturally the ENTIRE Everafter story does not take place within the asylum.. but nonetheless. A blast to create.

If some the comic pages are set up so... let's say a sentence starts on one page and ends on another, would you do a two page update to avoid confusion/frustration? Or do you just try to avoid that sort of thing?

spazmonkey wrote:If some the comic pages are set up so... let's say a sentence starts on one page and ends on another, would you do a two page update to avoid confusion/frustration? Or do you just try to avoid that sort of thing?

I think that will depend entirely on the situation. If the sentence is split in order to increase tension, I'll definitely keep it. But if I DO decide that two pages absolutely need to go together in order to make any sense or at the very least 'complete' a sequence that would be less effective split up, I'll probably update twice that day or week.

Thanks for the answer. Sounds like you had fun with the concept. I'm with you on the asylums in movies.

OK one more question...I have never read the story of Tom Thumb so when I saw that he has talking shoes, I was thinking either Endling did that or he actually has talking shoes. So was that your idea? And would you want a pair of talking shoes?

By reading this you promise your soul and first child to me. All babies not ripe and plump are subjected to burnation under the trogdor act of 2003.The problem is that God gave man a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.

"PPGD Fan"-And Dusk_imp, you too are a riot "Blood Knight"-Dusk_Imp, thanks for making this thread, it's so fun. B A Select Start

In the original story, Tom stole some ogre's seven-league boots (which, for those of you who don't know, are traditionally magical boots that can go very far in just one step, resulting in a sort of super-speed). He also tricked the ogre into killing his half-human, half-ogre abominations for children, all as an indirect result of his dickish parents throwing him and his brothers in the woods to die because they couldn't afford to feed all of them.It's a pretty good story, I suggest you read it. Very morbid, as you can see. I love morbid.

However, in the original story, the boots didn't talk, so I'm pretty sure the idea of the boots being sentient was all Endling.

Also, it has not been specified if Tom's boots in EverAfter have the traditional seven-league boot powers anyway.

So, there you go.

Last edited by Geno on Mon Sep 18, 2006 8:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.